Inactive users will gradually swamp active ones in subscriber lists

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

At the time of writing, package bug subscriptions have existed for roughly a year. Currently any bug reported about Ubuntu's "linux" package has 31 indirect subscribers, of which 8 are deactivated users.

Active users may subscribe to or unsubscribe from a package over time, but by definition deactivated users don't do anything, including unsubscribing from anything.

So unless something is changed otherwise, five or ten years from now the vast majority of subscribers to the average package will be deactivated users. This will make subscriber lists steadily less useful over time.

This problem applies not just to subscribing to package bugs, but also to individual bug reports, individual branches, a project's branches, a project's translations, or anything else.

One way of fixing this would be, when a user has been inactive for three years or so (so they've had plenty of time to change their mind), unsubscribe them from everything they were previously subscribed to.

[Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)]

Maybe we should just hide those inactive users in the web ui. Marking as low as this is not a problem until 5 or 10 years from now :-)

[William Grant (wgrant)]

Bug #241150 is related, but probably not a duplicate.

[William Grant (wgrant)]

... however, this does look like a duplicate of one of its related bugs, bug #238493.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Deactivated users are a problem in other places too. Suspended users are a similar problem though I doubt it will be scaling problem. We want to create process that unsubscribes deactivate and suspended users from everythin after a period of time to keep Launchpad clean. For suspended users, the time was 30 days, for deactivated users I was considering 2 years.

[William Grant (wgrant)]

On Sat, 2009-04-18 at 02:41 +0000, Curtis Hovey wrote:
> Deactivated users are a problem in other places too. Suspended users are
> a similar problem though I doubt it will be scaling problem. We want to
> create process that unsubscribes deactivate and suspended users from
> everythin after a period of time to keep Launchpad clean. For suspended
> users, the time was 30 days, for deactivated users I was considering 2
> years.

Why would you actually mutate data like that?

--
William Grant

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

On Sat, 2009-04-18 at 03:15 +0000, William Grant wrote:
> Why would you actually mutate data like that?

Because there are lots of operations that fail because the member of a
team is deactivated or suspended. We have to manually remove the user in
these cases.